Who'd want to bring home a Francis Bacon?

As the artist's triptych of Lucian Freud breaks auction records, Mark Hudson
asks what it tells us about the art world – and ourselves

Who would have thought that the highest price ever paid for a painting at auction would be for a triptych by an artist whose work is not by any conventional standard beautiful, who concentrates remorselessly on the dark side of existence, and whose personal life was a catalogue of voluntary violent sexual abuse? The answer is, just about everyone.

From the beginning of his career in the Thirties, Francis Bacon went from being a marginal outsider figure, whose dark, claustrophobic and uncompromisingly bleak canvases were appreciated only by a tiny avant garde coterie, to his current position, established largely since his death in 1992, as “unquestionably the greatest British artist of the 20th century”.

The work for which nearly £90 million was paid by a New York dealer on behalf of an anonymous buyer – at Christie’s in Manhattan, on Tuesday – is a triptych portrait of Bacon’s close friend and fellow artist, Lucian Freud. It’s a work that gives us two geniuses for the price of one. Yet the status of Freud, regarded as Britain’s greatest living artist over the latter part of his life, pales into insignificance beside the sheer magnitude of Bacon’s current stature.

The prices paid for works of art at this level are, of course, beyond rationality, bearing no relation to inflation, the value of the components or even the concrete notion of investment – or certainly not in the short term. This kind of art buying has no relation to anything other than itself. But if you did have bottomless coffers and the desire to dispense some of their contents on a single object, why wouldn’t you go for something that embodies a chunk of what we sometimes still call “civilisation”, which sums up some of the things we think of as ennobling humankind as a species?

The fact that we now invest such qualities in a painting by an artist whose work was thought of by the man in the street for much of his career as “like sick on the carpet”, and who happened to enjoy being violently raped, tells us a great deal about our changing attitudes towards what used to be called “beauty” and to what we value in art.

I remember the peculiar atmosphere that came with the name Francis Bacon when I first encountered it, at the age of about 12: uttered by my mother, Bacon’s name brought with it a sense of difficulty and edge, of embodying troubling things about the adult world that piqued my childish curiosity. It was an ambience very different from the one surrounding the man then deemed “unquestionably the greatest British artist of the 20th century”, the avuncular Yorkshire sculptor Henry Moore.

Both artists are closely associated with the aftermath of the Second World War. Out of the horror of that conflict and the disclosure of the death camps, which trampled on every last vestige of human decency, Moore created his Family Groups, abstracted figures that sought to elevate one of the simplest and most enduring elements of human existence: the family.

Bacon’s brutal nihilism, on the other hand, came close to identifying with the oppressor. The painting that made his reputation, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, shows three mutated, sightless figures howling in agony, terror or rage – or is it aggression? As with so much in Bacon’s work, it is difficult to say precisely what is happening, except that it patently offers naught for your comfort.

In Bacon’s trademark images of isolated men, the violence of his painterly technique seems to embody some oppressive violating power of which his homoerotic vision stands in awe. All his figures, whether imagined, drawn from his treasury of images – from boxers to war victims – or from people he knew – lovers, friends or heiresses – are imbued with the same quality of deadpan existential despair. This cosmic bleakness has gone beyond being something to be admired in terms of technical brilliance, or appreciated as an aspect of an era: it has become – exemplified by Monday night’s sale – a quality of spiritual aspiration.

When the poet Charles Baudelaire wrote his 1863 essay “The Painter of Modern Life” – a sort of manifesto for the modernist era – he referred to what we would today call aesthetics as “beauty”. At that time, it went without saying that beauty aspired towards, well, the beautiful, which in turn reflected Platonic ideals of moral value.

Since then, every verity of the preceding thousand years has been stood on its head. Against serenity we have come to prefer dynamic chaos; against smoothly evolved forms we like powerful abstraction; against supposedly universal truths we opt for ambivalence; we sneer at the goodies, and get a vicarious thrill from rooting for the baddies.

During the Sixties and Seventies, with our increasing tolerance for extreme violence in the cinema exemplified by films such as Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange, the popularity of Bacon’s paintings, with their relentless screaming faces – inspired by the famous bullet-in-the-eye shot in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin – inexorably rose in popularity, and have continued to do so.

The response to a current exhibition at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, pitting Bacon against his old rival Henry Moore, is instructive. Where 40 years ago Moore would have been considered much the greater artist, now it goes without saying that Bacon, the homosexual Anglo-Irish rebel, will win out over the establishment figure Moore.

Yet the veneration of Bacon the bad boy artist has become a lazy orthodoxy which obscures our sense of what is and is not of value in his work. Reading reviews of the Oxford show, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it was Bacon’s status as a maverick that was up for discussion rather than the quality of his paintings, and that it had won him the tournament with the hapless Moore before the critics had even got off the train from London.

I’m not out to denigrate Bacon. Far from it. His early work is his best, and at its best it is fearsomely good. But I’m not sure the painting on which nearly £90 million was spent on Monday night falls into that category. The best of Bacon takes you to a terrifying place where, down among the spilt fluids and debased flesh in his claustrophobic rooms, you realise that at the base of existence there are no redeeming factors – that life doesn’t have what Albert Camus called “une morale de boy scout”. Bacon’s pitilessness was a revelation in its time.

Yet over a career spanning 60 years its single note became monotonous. Much of his later work is mannered and repetitive. The savagery of his brushwork appears spontaneous, but it was always carefully controlled. There’s nothing wrong with that per se: that is artistry. But Bacon’s painting became progressively a matter of rolling out well-rehearsed stylistic tics with no real development.

Meanwhile, the rest of us who are not extremely wealthy single male artists, like Bacon, have to get on with the business of life in the knowledge that there may not be an easy moral at the basis of existence, let alone a god, but that there are many redeeming factors.

Bacon was too astute to allow the King Lear-like hopelessness of his vision to appear self-indulgent. But he has limitations as an artist that are likely to become apparent long before the buyer of Three Studies of Lucian Freud sees the chance of a return on their investment.